Small Ones
A few random notes. Swimming The girls swim season is off to a solid start. L moved up an age group this year, and is now swimming full, 25-yard lengths of the pool instead of the 6-and-under, 12-yard lengths. It’s been a good challenge for her. We were especially proud of her last night. The team we were swimming against…
Summer Notes
Some catch up on general summer notes. Monday was our annual trip to the 4H fair where the girls’ cousin shows pigs every year. As usual, they had fun walking through the buildings and viewing the pigs, cows, goats, sheep, and rabbits. No poultry this year because of the avian flu thing and the horses were not shown on Monday,…
Weather And Swimming
I think we’ve officially reached the point where I can say that this is a weird ass summer. At least weather-wise and so far. We are in week three of consistent storms, cloudy skies, and crazy temperature swings. First, we had a cool week. Then a very warm week where we had thick, nasty, Kansas City/St. Louis/Cincinnati humidity. And now…
Change of Seasons
The Stanley Cup playoffs ended Monday night and the NBA Finals wrapped up last night.1 Winter sports are finally over! Our family’s sports are in transition, too. Softball finally came to an end last week, albeit an earlier-than-expected one. C.’s team dropped their opening game of the tournament by four runs. They were down by 10 runs early, cut it…
Swim Until Exhaustion
The first full weekend of summer is in the books. Let’s go back a couple days to our first two days of summer vacation, last Thursday and Friday. Nothing too exciting on the agenda either day. Some bike rides, softball hitting practice in the street, hanging out with a visiting aunt, a trip to the library. And the girls first…
Last Meet
Man, talk about going out with a bang. The girls wrapped up their swimming season Thursday at the annual invitational meet, which featured all six swimming teams that make up the conference they compete in. Fortunately, rather than being held in a four-lane, neighborhood pool, it was at a 10 lane high school pool. Still, we arrived at 9:00 in…
The Swimming Life
interminable |inˈtərmənəbəl| adjective endless (often used hyperbolically): we got bogged down in interminable discussions. The girls have begun their competitive swimming careers. Their first meet was last Thursday, they swam again Tuesday night, and we have another meet scheduled for tonight. (Edit: Well, we were supposed to swim tonight. But just before warm ups were set to begin a huge…
Kid Stuff
Our first full week of summer kicked off today. I was looking at the calendar last night and it sunk in how short summers are for kids these days. I remember getting out of school the week of Memorial Day most years and not going back until the day after Labor Day. A full three months to waste in swimming…
Reporter’s Notebook
We are in the heart of the winter sports season. Girls basketball sectionals were last weekend, and none of the teams I cover survived to regionals. I believe that’s the first time that has been the case since I started working for my paper. Boys basketball has two more weeks before sectionals begin. I covered the girls state swimming and…
Weekend Notes
Some various and sundry notes about the weekend past. I covered the boys high school state championship this weekend. As always, it was something else. The event itself is kind of tedious, especially when I only had one swimmer, who was in the finals of two events, to write about. Watching the crowd is the best. I believe I’ve written…